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Process & Practices

In-App Subscriptions Made Easy

There are various types of subscriptions: recurring, non-recurring, free-trial periods, various billing cycles and any possible billing variation one can imagine. But with lack of information online, you might discover that mobile subscriptions behave differently from what you expected. This article will make your life somewhat easier when addressing an in-app subscriptions implementation.

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Enterprise Architecture

EIP Designer: Bridging the Gap Between EA and Development

This article presents the EIP Designer project, an Eclipse-based tool for introducing integration patterns into an EA design, providing fluidity and continuity while filling the gap existing between EA practices and concrete software development.

News

The Puppet Labs: State of DevOps Report 2015 shows the current DevOps trends in IT, comparing the high and low performers in terms of deployment success and stability, and observing the link between architecture and developer productivity.

For an organization to be data-driven, it's not enough to just dump mountains of data. That data needs to be accurate and meaningful. Julianna Göbölös-Szabó, data engineer at Prezi shared how they improved the quality of its log data. Their solution involved moving from unstructured to structured data with a lightweight, contract-based approach to nudge all teams in the right direction.

Jessie Frazzelle, member of Docker's core team, is responsible for Docker's testing infrastructure. Frazzelle described Docker's build workflows for both the master branch and pull requests as well as the various tools that are part of the testing infrastructure. Jenkins, Consul and nsq are all key components of the testing infrastructure, working together with Docker's custom tools.

HashiCorp have publicly released Atlas, a commercial platform that unites their open source tools for development and operations to create a version control system for infrastructure management. Atlas integrates HashiCorp’s Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, and Consul tooling, with the primary goal of promoting ‘automation, audit and collaboration on infrastructure changes’ across the modern datacenter.

The state of testing 2015 report shares results from this year's testing survey that was organized by Joel Montvelisky from PractiTest and Lalit Bhamare from Tea-Time with Testers. It provides insights in the adoption of test techniques and practices, test automation, and the challenges that testers are facing. InfoQ did an interview with the organizers of the survey.

Only 38% of IT professionals use containers in production environments, according to a recent survey. ClusterHQ, which ran the survey of the current state of container usage and adoption, also concludes that 73% of respondents are running containers in a VM environment.

At the recent devopsdays Amsterdam 2015, Patrick Roelke contended that monitoring still has lots of issues. Roelke believes that data science can help by eliminating static thresholds and coalescing information from various data sources into a single metric. The talk included a quick overview of monitoring tools that leverage data science: Kale, Bosun and AnomalyDetection.

An interview with Ivan Kusalic, Software/DevOps engineer at Nokia HERE in Berlin, about why they decided to apply DevOps, how DevOps has changed their way of working, which benefits they are getting, and the challenges that they had and how they dealt with them when development and operations became one team. Kusalic also gives some advice for applying DevOps with teams.

David Mytton, CEO at Server Density, shared with the devopsdays Amsterdam 2015 crowd how they handle incidents and outages. The process is grounded on a key set of principles: frequent public updates; exhaustive logging of the response activities; team effort and effective escalation. Server Density draws a lot of inspiration from the aviation industry, renowned for its safety procedures.

At QCon New York 2015, Mitchell Hashimoto discussed how tools such as a HashiCorp’s Terraform and Consul could be utilised to orchestrate infrastructure provisioning and application lifecycle management of cloud and container-based applications, with the ultimate goal of safely delivering software systems at scale.

The discussion on ITIL vs. DevOps is a common one. There are different views: ITIL and DevOps have different mindsets; ITIL and DevOps are compatible; they are different but both have their place in the IT department. Charles Betz, member of the Open Group IT4IT Forum, argues that their principles are at odds. ITIL is trapped in a phased workflow mindset. DevOps embraces lean product management.

Steve Smith presented at Devoxx UK 2015 how Continuous Delivery is performed within Atlassian. After the talk, we had the chance to discuss further details of his presentation and ask him a few questions.

InfoQ did an interview with Menno Vis, IT director of bol.com, about the benefits of increasing agility, how bol.com deploys Scrum, using roadmaps with agile, the challenges that have been faced when scaling agile, the main focus area's at bol.com for agile scaling, establishing loosely coupled teams, and the things that bol.com does for their people to have fun while doing their work.

When developing large complex systems and dealing with legacy code, organizations need to have systems in place to support integration and delivery. Modularization can help when agile is scaled with multiple teams that are working in parallel. It's not the framework or method that will do the job, but how your people will make it work to solve your problems says Hans Dekkers.